


Incapable

by ABeckoningCat



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:25:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABeckoningCat/pseuds/ABeckoningCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The author personally wants to see Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton together, however I was challenged to write a story wherein Natasha's feelings for Clint weren't returned, and how she had to deal with that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“You could tell him,” Tony suggested over drinks.  There was a point at which he’d fall down the rabbit hole and descend into self-destructive madness, but this was lucid Tony, only two or three drinks in and still sensitive and insightful, gentle but straightforward with her in the way few other people could be.

 

Natasha didn’t want to like him.  She preferred thinking he was a self-absorbed egomaniacal asshole, but it turned out falling through wormholes – metaphorical and otherwise – was a thing he did regularly, each time coming through as a slightly different, a slightly  _better_  person.

She’d still choke him out the next time he slapped her ass in passing, but at just that moment, with just that precise amount of alcohol in him, Stark was actually an okay guy.

“I can’t just…  I’ve  _tried_.”

“Do or do not, Natasha, there is no try.”

“What is that… is that some sort of Star Trek, Babylon 5 thing?”

“It’s… are you joking?”

“Lord of the Rings?”

“…you’re joking.”

“I can’t just tell him.”

“Why not?”

“Because he already knows.  Because I  _already_ told him.”

“When?  If you had, I’d know about it.  I listen in on everything.   _Everything_.”

She dipped a forefinger into the steadily watering brandy in her tumbler, swirling it just to hear the soft percussion of ice against the glass.

“It wasn’t recently, it was… in New Mexico, after Malibu.”

“Mm-hm,” he sipped and watched her.

“He met me at the airport when I flew back from LAX, I took a commercial flight.  We had a few drinks at the bar on the concourse.  And then… a few more.”

“And then a few more, I’m guessing, because you don’t get drunk.  Go ahead.”

“I asked him… no, I  _told_ him that I was in love with him.”

“And?”

“And he laughed.”

Even Tony set his teeth and hissed in at that, then threw back the rest of his drink.  He reached for the decanter, refreshing his glass.

“Ouch.  That doesn’t seem very Jeremy Renner of him.”

“You know he hates when you make that comparison, right?”

“Have you  _met_  me…?”

Natasha sighed, throwing back the rest of the brandy just to give herself a moment to think.  As soon as the glass was reset he was refilling it, as if purely for the fact that he hated drinking alone.

“He was drunk, but I don’t think he was  _that_  drunk.  He knew what I was telling him.  Basically it came down to the fact that… he thought that we had a really good thing going.  That he loved me like a friend and a partner, but that he just didn’t… he didn’t feel that way about me.”  She started in on her drink again, sip by listless sip. “I dropped it.  I drove us back. The next morning he pretended he didn’t really remember everything that was said the night before, and I… he asked me if  _I_  remembered.  And he looked at me, when he said it.  And I  _knew_  he knew, I knew it was all clear as day, he just… he wanted permission to forget I’d ever told him.  Because he didn’t want it hanging between us, that I was in love with him.  It was easier to pretend it was a big hole in the ground that we could just walk around and step over, and never have to fall in.”

Tony was already halfway through his glass, and well on his way to losing the best of his confidant qualities.

“So you said…?”

“That it was nothing.  That we had a few drinks, bullshitted about work and the game on TV and… then I took us home.”  She threw back the rest of her drink, making a dismissive motion over it as Tony reached automatically for the decanter.  “And it’s never come up again.”

“Until now.”

“Until now,” she sighed, pursing her lips hard as she watched the ice melt slowly to the bottom of her glass.  Tony stared at her with quiet regret, hovering the lip of the tumbler at his mouth.

“I’m sorry I showed you that tape.”

“I asked to see it.”

“I know, but it was a mistake, I didn’t think.”

“It was important to the miss—“

“There  _is_  no mission anymore, Natasha.  Sometimes you have to disconnect yourself from the things that put you in a spiral, I get that now, okay, I _understand_  that.  I didn’t realize I would be making it worse.”

She went to take another pull, remembered it was empty, remembered she was done, and pushed the glass away from her with her fingertips, sighing.  When she went to stand from the bar stool Tony reached for her, catching her elbow in a way that only recently started arresting her instead of causing an instinctively defensive strike.

“Don’t go,” he told her, eyes wet and black as slate after a rain.  “Okay?  We need you.”

“We weren’t ever part of Fury’s plan, you know that.”

“I didn’t say anything about Fury, I said  _we_ , I meant the  _team_.   _We_  need you.  Both of you.”  And when she tried tiredly to pull away he met her eyes again, emphatic.  “I mean it.  Don’t go.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Talk to him.”  Another moment longer, his head tipping forward to put a dark, heavy period at the end of that statement, and then he flexed his hand open to let her go.  Natasha snatched her coat up from the seat alongside her, shrugging into it as she nodded towards her glass.

“I’m going for a walk.  Thanks for the drink.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Is this love, Agent Barton?”

Just like that.  Just like he’d said the words to her, with that same thread of self-satisfaction weaving its way in and out of his voice.  Loki hadn’t been onscreen, at least not for most of the video, and it was only by luck that Clint had positioned himself in such a way as to be visible to the camera’s eye.  

He wasn’t looking directly at it.  He always knew where every camera was in a room, often before she did, so the fact that he stood there so deliberately, the pale blue fractal pattern of his eyes directed unblinkingly off-screen, was even more unnerving than it would have been otherwise.

Did he know it was there?  Had Loki put him there purposely, or was it an oversight, the first crack in the facade.  He was running a fever of 104 when she finally clocked him back to his senses, his body trying to fight off the possession like a virus, and even in the grainy video Tony had culled from their temporary underground headquarters it was possible to see the circles growing under his eyes, the sweat on his brow.

“Agent Barton?”, Loki prompted, growing impatient.

“No,” he said grimly, plainly.  The God’s boots scraped in the background as he paced.

“Are you sure about that?”

“As sure as I need to be.”

“Because once we leave here, Agent Barton, once you go upon your way and I go upon mine, we will not have the opportunity to reconvene.  Your allegiance to your superiors compromised your aim once before.  I won’t be pleased if you miss again.”

“I won’t miss,” Clint overenunciated this declaration, so crisply that Natasha had shivered with an actual chill, her face ghostly in the blue backwash of the monitor.

“Then you don’t love her?”

“No.”  

She’d cringed.

Loki’s pale nosetip had appeared at the edge of the screen, towering above the compact archer, the edges of his sleeves visible as his arms relaxed at his sides.

“Good.  Because rest assured she will be a key player in this, I can sense it.  Tell me everything.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Does  _she_  love  _you_ , Agent Barton?”  Natasha couldn’t see the rictus of his grin, but she heard it in the way his voice curled on the air.  Clint’s eyes flicked back and forth, studying.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure of this, are you?”

“She told me as much.”

And his laugh, Loki’s laugh, velvet and razorwire.  He paced away again, out of sight, brimming with amusement.

“Oh, but I would love to hear that story.”

“I was picking her up from the—”

“I wasn’t being literal, you imbecile.  Just the facts will suffice for now… your piddling, over-romanticized crushes on one another are of utterly no import to me.”  A pause, thoughtful.  “But you’re certain she spoke in earnest?  I would have thought the Black Widow to be incapable of so mean an emotion as love.”

“it’s not that she’s incapable of love so much as she’s incapable of letting her guard down enough to give it a chance,” Clint said.  Loki paused thoughtfully.

“And yet she loves you.”

“Her guard is down around me.”

“Oh, I like that.  I like that very much indeed.” Scrape, shift, the soft turn on a sole as he came stalking back.  With it came a different sound, metal scraping concrete, as of a chair being dragged nearer.  Clint’s chin downturned, eyes tracking the trickster as he evidently seated himself off-camera, preparing for storytime.  “Begin at the beginning, Agent Barton.  Tell me all that you know of her… all her transgressions, all her fears.  Describe to me, in intimate detail, all the ways in which a creature such as she can be undone, and leave nothing to my imagination.”

Clint blinked, disaffected, assembled his thoughts with no hint of hesitancy or regret.

“She’s a killer,” he said.  “Strip away everything else, and that’s what she is at her heart, what she’ll always be.  A soulless killer wearing the skin of a real woman.”

Loki’s laugh was a soft rasp on the air.

“Perhaps I took the wrong Agent.”

The corners of Clint’s mouth trembled and fell with a small smile, and that’s when Natasha had reached for the video controls with a trembling hand, her vision blurred with tears.

“I can surprise you.”


	3. Chapter 3

The best laid plans.

It was too dark, and too late, and she was leaving a morse code trail of blood on the sidewalk behind her, fat droplets as black in the moonlight as motor oil.  She kept a hand to the wound purely out of reflex, although the little knife was doing a fair job of keeping her corked up like a dyke.

Her other hand fumbled at her earpiece.

“Hey.  Anybody on channel?”

Natasha wasn’t the praying type.  Whatever earnest prayers she scraped together  on the cold, bare floor of the chamber Petrovich threw her into when she underperformed, she was fairly sure they were long mitigated by all the horrors she wrought in-between.  God regularly killed mothers and dogs, what favor could he possibly spare for little Russian spies?

Nevertheless, as she waited for a reply she thought to herself, Please let it be Steve.  She felt strangely equipped to deal with Rogers tonight.  Something-something-unrequited love.

“What’s up, Nat?”

_Fuck._

She sighed, thumbed the com to send-receive, and went back to holding the knife so that the blade wouldn’t needle any deeper as she walked.

“Hey.  You busy?”

“Nothing I can’t do later.”

“I could  use a lift.”

“Where are you?”

“Lexington, about ten blocks south of—”

“Hang on, I’m up on the roof. Wave your arm.”

Feeling ridiculous, she waved one arm above her head, trying not to notice the even stranger looks this earned her as she walked.  At least the sidewalks were fairly empty.

“See me?”

“I see you.”

“You know how creepy that is, right?.”

“Is that a… Nat, are you _bleeding_?”

“ _Really_ creepy, is how creepy that is.”

“Shit, just — there’s a bus stop half a block up from you, just wait there, I’ll take one of Stark’s cars.”

“Pick one with red interior.”

“Hysterical.  Don’t move.”

The Bugatti had white interior, which Natasha had to assume made it a natural choice, and she gave him a withering look as she squeezed herself inside.

“You’re not a nice man.”

“You’ve seen my resume, right?”  He sighed, setting his teeth uncomfortably.  “Fuck, what is that, a Ka-Bar?  They couldn’t even stab you with something quality?”

“Kids these days.”  She exhaled loudly, more loudly than she meant to, and pulled at the seatbelt until it laid taut across her chest.  “I’m in. Go.”

“You all right?”

“It’s like two inches, it’s Stark’s cock, it’s nothing.”

He snorted drily, checking traffic before he pulled them off the curb and wove with dangerous aggression back towards the Tower.  Another man would have had them colliding with parked cars and street lights, but he bifurcated his attention effortlessly between the street and the mirror, adjusting it to watch her hold the hilt carefully in place.

“So what happened?”

“Kid tried to mug me in the park.  I tried to convince him he should let me take him to a shelter instead.  He wasn’t a fan of the idea.”

“You should’ve laid him out, Nat.”

“He was, like, twelve.”

“Yeah, well.  You know the old saying: if there’s grass on the field, slit their throats.”

“Softie.”

He watched her grimace and loll her head against the seat, and paid less attention to her wound than the shadows that had set up beneath her eyes..

“Y’alright?”

“Fine.”

“Talk to me.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“How about why you’re out walking around… what was it, St. Elias Park?”

“Bristolcade.”

“Bristolcade Park, nice, what were you doing out there at this hour?”

“I needed to clear my head.”

“Usually come to me for that, don’t you?”

Natasha stayed silent, watching the slither of light and traffic through the smoked window, and Clint stared at her profile, weaving them through traffic as effortlessly as if his eyes had been fixed dead ahead.  He turned forward again.  “…which means I’m what you’re trying to clear out of your head.”

“Clint,” she sighed, eyes closing.

“Is this about…  _him_?   _It_?  Is this about  _it_?”

“It’s not about—”

“—because we can talk about it.  Everybody doesn’t have to keep fucking pussyfooting around it, y’know, I did my time on the couch, I got my nines, signed and notarized—”

“—it’s not… will you please?  It’s not about—”

“—tell me what I did here, Nat, talk to me about it, somebody fucking talkto me about it, because I’m sick of all the bullshit excuses over—”

“— _it isn’t what you did_ ,” she screamed suddenly, and the stridence of her own voice frightened her.  Frightened them both.  Natasha Romanoff didn’t scream.  She yelled with purpose, she barked when she had to, but screaming was a thing reserved for undercover distractions and twenty-somethings with one too many cocktails in them.  She didn’t realize she was putting her head to the window until the glass thudded coolly against her temple.

She said again, tiredly, “…it isn’t what you did.”

“No?”  Back and forth now, street and passenger seat, his head turning with a sharpness that would have been hilariously bird-like under different circumstances.  “Okay, it’s not something I did, then fine, tell me what it  _was_.  Tell me what it was that I  _didn’t_  do that’s got you out walking around the barrio at two in the m—…”

And all at once she heard it in his voice, heard it as surely as she’d once known the reluctant pleading in his eyes: let’s pretend this didn’t happen.  She swallowed and blinked, adjusting her grip on the knife.

“I think…  I think I ought to go.”

“Shut up,” his voice was pure discomfort.  “Go where?”

“I don’t know.  Anywhere.  Back to SHIELD.  Fury will have me back.  I think I need to… take a break.  Figure out what I want to do.”

“I thought  _this_  is what we were doing.  We sat down and we  _talked_  about this, remember?  Split a whole pizza between us and wrote pro- and con- lists out on the back of placemats.”  Back and forth, street and passenger seat. “…and then we took it back to the range and saw how many bullets and arrows we could shoot through them instead of tossing a coin.”

“Wasn’t a fair contest,” she rasped softly, unfocusing her eyes to watch a single lamplit bead of water slide down the glass.  “You had more grease on yours, paper wouldn’t hold up.”

“Look, fuck all that, OK?  Why do you wanna give this up now?  We agreed we were gonna give this a shot.”  And when she didn’t answer right away he pressed, “What changed?”

“Hope,” she said, and heard her voice break like fiberboard, soft and crumbling at the edges.  She pressed her lips together hard, that rosebud purse that could be either coy smile or bitter pain.  “I lost hope.”

“Hope for…”  but even Clint’s voice wore thin halfway through, and she heard the exhaustion in his exhale before he tried again.  “Hope for what?”

Natasha sat back at last, rolling a look at him beneath the dark awning of her lashes, suddenly insensitive to the little knife still wedged above her hip.

“I fooled myself — I’d  _been_  fooling myself into thinking that you’d fall in love with me.  Did you ever… Clint, did you ever have something hurt you and… and you don’t get it taken care of right away, you just let it linger, like an aching tooth or an old muscle injury … so long that you almost forget it’s there? Some pains, y’know, they become part of your baseline.  And then one day you bite into something sweet, or you twist the wrong way, and you feel it again.  It flares up, sharp and fast, and you just… you realize all the misery you’ve been living with.  You suddenly remember it’s there, and you can’t go back to ignoring it.”

He was trying to find levity, trying to do what he did best — diffuse a difficult situation with the black humor that only they seemed to understand — but it was just out of reach.  His voice faltered at it as he said, “So that’s… what, that’s what I am now?  A bad tooth?  Jesus, Nat, you could have just called me a pain in your ass and been done with it, you had to go right for the dental problems?”

“Stop.”

He breathed out hard.  She looked at him.

“Tell me.”

“Tell you.  Tell you what?”

“That you don’t love me.”

“Nat…”

“Tell me.”

“I  _do_  love you, you know that—”

“You know how I mean.  Tell me, because I need to hear you say it once.  Out loud. Not as a… not as a phantom on a video tape, I need to  _hear_  you say it, and see how it feels.”

But he was obstinate, staring sullenly ahead until she prompted him again with the sound of his name.

“Clint.”

“I don’t love you.”  He didn’t say it so much as bite the words out of the air.  Not bitterly, just bitterly honest.  The truth was the folded flag of her hope, and it was a delivery he’d never wanted to make.  “I don’t love you, and I don’t think I could ever love you.”

And she crumpled, sat forward until the belt clicked and held her in a limp forward sling, grimacing to the hot sting of tears at her lashes.  Clint looked at her miserably, as if the knife in her was his own.

“Nat.”

“Ssh.”

“ _Nat_.”

“ _Shut up,_ ** _ssh_**.”  She held and she held, and finally she let go the hilt, caging bloody hands to her eyes as she broke with a single, awful sob.  Then silence, just trembling silence, her shoulders shaking as she pressed her lips and cinched her eyes and closed herself up with grief.  His breathing jagged at the air next to her.

She didn’t pick her head up, but divined through the slivered gaps in her fingers when the streetlights became darkness, and the darkness became artificially bright, the hum of a garage cocooning the car as it glided down into the footings of the Tower.  Clint said nothing, returning the car to its gap-toothed spot in the low row of luxury vehicles, then killing the engine and sitting with the keys cupped in one hand.

“…you want me to say I’m sorry?”

“You’re not sorry,” Natasha said at last, sitting back, her cheek smudged with fingerstreaks of blood.  She looked at him as if to challenge a rebuttal, but he didn’t have one.

“No.”

“I love you,” she broke mournfully, and he tightened up uncomfortably, looking out the window.  “I don’t think you know just how much.  You’re my world.”

“Nat.”

“Clint.”  He looked at her, and she shook her head, lips pursed against tears.  “I have to go.”

“…c’mon.”

“I love you,” she said again, because it was the only thing that would shut down whatever limp protest he was casting for.  Her hand groped for the door.  “And I have to go.”

He cupped the keys and followed her with his eyes, silent but unmournful, and not half so broken as she wanted him to be.  It was just as well, for the wrong look, the wrong word from him would have been another shred of hope for her to cling to, and she could no longer abide hope.

The door popped, loud in the garage acoustics, and she unfolded herself awkwardly from the low sling of the car, letting it slam shut after her.

The whole way to the elevator she waited for the sounds of him scrambling for the door, calling out her name in sudden epiphany, begging her to reconsider because he was wrong, or hard-headed, or he thought he could change, if only she would stop and come back.

Waited for it.

Prayed for it.

She never bothered with prayers again.


End file.
